If you’re like most IT leaders, you might find yourself in the middle of a digital transformation as you seek to use cloud for workloads like development, testing or application deployments.

But cloud initiatives can sometimes be hindered by the complexities of business-critical applications like SAP and Oracle. Concerns about data migration, security, data sovereignty or simply gaining support from other lines of business can make it difficult to transform your business with cloud.

If these challenges sound familiar, you’re not alone.

In response, leaders are increasingly relying on cloud managed services (CMS) to help accelerate return on investment by delivering the skills to optimize cloud. In addition, CMS removes day-to-day operations from IT staff, allowing them to focus on activities that deliver higher value and business differentiation.

To better understand the challenges and benefits of CMS, Frost & Sullivan, on behalf of IBM, interviewed more than 260 C-suite and senior IT decision makers from companies with at least 500 employees. All respondents either used managed services or were considering managed services for their SAP or Oracle workloads.